"Who the hell is James Webb?" you might ask. Well, he was a lawyer and a bureaucrat. He happened to be the top administrator of NASA through the glory years of Gemini and Apollo, but he was not a scientist.

Is anyone else offended by having a piece of advanced technology named after a bureaucrat? I'm fine with putting his name on a government building, but I think the next generation space telescope should be named after a scientist - perhaps Carl Sagan.

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For all you space freaks out there the latest issue (Dec) of the Smithsonian mag has an interesting article on the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk. It is astounding what this South African has accomplished thus far! And he does it on a shoestring budget that makes the US government and NASA look extremely inefficient when it comes to getting metal into space .

Here is Neil deGrasse Tyson saying what he thinks is the most astounding fact he can share about the universe. I did not, apparently, inherit the 'embed code' gene, so I will post it as this link here. It's under 4 minutes, and the text is also written under the video.

Thanks Reg. I always love reading about Hubble - but even this article now mentions Webb. It bothers me to hear the two names in the same sentence. The U.S. is experience such a terrible wave of anti-intellectualism and, as all to many countries are, is governed by lawyers rather than scientists - and now Webb, another lawyer, is walking on Hubble's coattails. :(